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Book Cover for: Wait, Blink: A Perfect Picture of Inner Life: A Novel, Gunnhild Øyehaug

Wait, Blink: A Perfect Picture of Inner Life: A Novel

Gunnhild Øyehaug

Critic Reviews

Good

Based on 6 reviews on

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Nominee:National Book Award -Translation (2018)

"Expansive, intimate, and filled to the brim with delight, Gunnhild Oyehaug's first novel is devoted to the unexpected connections between lonesome individuals, mundane rituals, jellyfish, death, oversized men's shirts, and a thousand other things too astonishing to spoil in this sentence. I truly loved this wide-eyed, all-embracing wonder of a book." --Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

Sigrid is a young literature student trying to find her voice as a writer when she falls in love with an older, established author, whose lifestyle soon overwhelms her values and once-clear vision. Trine has reluctantly become a mother and struggles to create as a performance artist. The aspiring movie director Linnea scouts locations in Copenhagen for a film she will never make. As these characters' stories collide and intersect, they find that dealing with the pressures of their lives also means coming to grips with a world both frightening and joyously ridiculous.

Wait, Blink combines wild associations, quotations, coincidences, and other peculiar details into a unique tale that is both humorous and profound. Full of the playfulness that drew acclaim for her story collection Knots, Gunnhild Øyehaug's Wait, Blink--her first novel to be translated into English--is a jolt of desire and fantasy, romance and regret: a fable about what it means to own up to the weirdness inside us all.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Picador USA
  • Publish Date: Aug 13rd, 2019
  • Pages: 288
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 7.10in - 4.40in - 0.90in - 0.40lb
  • EAN: 9781250215024
  • Categories: LiteraryWomenWorld Literature - Norway

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About the Author

Øyehaug, Gunnhild: - Gunnhild Øyehaug is an award-winning Norwegian poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her story collection Knots was published by FSG in 2017, followed in 2018 by Wait, Blink, which was adapted into the acclaimed film Women in Oversized Men's Shirts, and in 2022 by Present Tense Machine. Øyehaug lives in Bergen, where she teaches creative writing.
Dickson, Kari: - Kari Dickson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and grew up bilingual. She has a BA in Scandinavian studies and an MA in translation. Her translation of Brown, written by Håkon Øvreås and illustrated by Øyvind Torseter, won the 2020 Mildred L. Batchelder Award. Before becoming a translator, she worked in theater in London and Oslo.

More books by Gunnhild Øyehaug

Book Cover for: Knots: Stories, Gunnhild Øyehaug
Book Cover for: Evil Flowers: Stories, Gunnhild Øyehaug
Book Cover for: Present Tense Machine, Gunnhild Øyehaug

Critics’ reviews

Praise for this book

"Wait, Blink is a novel of teeming originality that will rewire your brain and gleefully eclipse whole libraries of lesser fiction." --Ryan Chapman, BOMB

"Expansive, intimate, and filled to the brim with delight, Gunnhild Øyehaug's first novel is devoted to the unexpected connections between lonesome individuals, mundane rituals, jellyfish, death, oversized men's shirts, and a thousand other things too astonishing to spoil in this sentence. I truly loved this wide-eyed, all-embracing wonder of a book." --Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine and Intimations

"Wait, Blink is a thrillingly expansive novel filled with giddy riffs on everything from kung fu to the life of mussels in a seabed. Gunnhild Øyehaug is one of the most exciting writers working today." ---Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation

"I have been captivated by Gunnhild Øyehaug's wit, imagination, ironic social commentary, and fearless embrace of any and every form of storytelling." --Lydia Davis, author of Can't and Won't

"[Øyehaug's] work is playful, often surreal, intellectually rigorous, and brief . . . Øyehaug is intensely interested in consciousness, and in the pictures consciousness makes; this emphasis constantly humanizes her experiments in abstraction and the fantastical." ---James Wood, The New Yorker